The Jewels of Tessa Kent (26 page)

“But you’re Tessa Kent!”

“Well … yes, I am, but actually I’m Maggie Horvath’s sister.”

“Oh, my goodness!” The girl’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Doesn’t she even acknowledge me?” Tessa asked, raising her eyebrows in amused surprise.

“No … yes … a little while ago.”

“Ashamed of her sister, is she, the little devil?”

“No. Of course not, oh, my goodness.”

“Miss Dodd’s office?” Tessa reminded her gently.

“I’ll show you the way. Oh, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming!”

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you.”

Tessa chatted calmly with the thrilled, flustered girl until she reached her destination.

“Ah, Miss Dodd,” Tessa said, shaking hands and responding to the headmistress’s greeting, “I know I should have come to visit sooner but one thing and another has kept me away, and Madison Webster has always spoken so highly of you that I felt sure Maggie would love it here.”

“Oh, she does. And we love her,” responded the lean, gray-haired woman who looked as if she must have won a title at Wimbleton many years earlier. She was used to dealing with the high-powered local socialite mothers,
but the vision of Tessa made her gasp. She’d never believed real people could look like this.

“I’m delighted to hear that. I hope you were able to excuse Maggie from her classes this afternoon so she can show me around. And were you able to arrange an assembly?”

“Indeed yes, at four o’clock. Oh, here’s Maggie now.”

Maggie jumped into Tessa’s arms with a shout of joy and held on tightly.

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you,” Maggie whispered, almost in tears at an apparition she’d never expected to appear in Miss Dodd’s office. “You look like a real movie star.”

“That’s the general idea, darling,” Tessa said into Maggie’s ear, giving her a kiss and smoothing her hair. “Now, if Miss Dodd doesn’t mind, why don’t you take me to your classroom and introduce me to your classmates?”

“They’re all in the lab now, we’re doing experiments.”

“Then let’s go there, I want to see everything, but first, your friends. You show me the way,” Tessa said, taking Maggie’s slightly grubby hand and swinging it playfully.

In the lab all experiments came to a halt as Maggie led Tessa around the room. Maggie watched, entranced and grinning widely, as one by one her classmates mumbled their awed hellos and Tessa easily found something different to say to each one of them.

“Oh, so you’re Sally Bradford,” Tessa said, taking the dainty, blond girl’s hand. Her voice carried to every corner of the room although she wasn’t speaking loudly. “How interesting to meet you. I understand from my sister, Maggie, that your mother’s an expert in genealogy?”

“Well, she sort of likes to know who’s who, if that’s what you mean,” Sally muttered, turning red.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Tessa said with her
most charming smile. “Would you give her a message from me, Sally, to add to her hobby? It’s a bit complicated but I’m sure you can remember it. My husband is a man named Luke Blake. His stepbrother is Tyler Webster, Candice and Allison Webster’s father. My little sister, Maggie, is, naturally, my husband’s sister-in-law, but since she’s so young, she calls Mr. Webster ‘uncle’ and Mrs. Webster ‘aunt,’ out of courtesy. They’re not blood relations, but they are part of Maggie’s family, and she lives with them because our parents, the Horvaths, were both killed in an automobile accident four years ago. Maggie and I were left orphans. I’d already changed my name to Kent when I made my first movie, but my name is really Teresa Horvath, not Tessa Kent. Now, does that clear things up? Can you repeat it?”

“Ah, ah … Maggie’s your sister.”

“And?”

“Your husband is Mr. Blake and he’s also the halfbrother of Mr. Webster …”

“No, Sally, the stepbrother of Mr. Webster. My husband’s father married Mr. Webster’s mother after his first wife died.”

“Oh.”

“It is complicated, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And hard to understand, much less be expert about, especially when you have the facts all wrong. But do remember to give your mother my message and add that I send her my best regards for taking such an interest in Maggie’s family. Good-bye Sally,” Tessa said, turning away. Suddenly she stopped and stooped to look the girl in the eye. “I hope I’ve cleared up the ‘mystery.’ ”

Looking at the floor, Sally nodded her head.

“Good,” Tessa said crisply, going on to greet the next girl.

W
hat a bloody bore, this Yank institution, these Oscars, this lumbering, pretentious, blatantly commercial sideshow that had managed to make itself a source of mindless, gaping worldwide attention, Luke Blake thought, as he foamed angrily around the living room of his suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. The television set was tuned in to the 1982 Oscars, although the sound was off and had been off since the beginning of the telecast.

Hours earlier, in the middle of the afternoon, Tessa, dressed and ready to present the Best Picture award, had stepped into her limo, escorted by Roddy Fensterwald.

Luke had accompanied her himself the previous year, because then she’d been up for her second Best Actress award, facing a field of rivals that included Marsha Mason, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, and Jessica Lange. Of course he’d been at her side to hold her hand. He wouldn’t have considered letting her sit there in the audience, waiting for the results throughout the endless evening, without him, but tonight Tessa wasn’t nominated for anything and her function was purely ceremonial.
She’d be planted backstage for hours, gossiping with the other presenters, she’d told him, in her most persuasive tones, and there was simply no reason for him to endure hours of tedium—she knew how bored he got—just for her brief moment in the spotlight. “You’ll be so much more comfortable at home, darling, watching me on television, and the view will be better anyway.”

She’d been an utterly improbable vision when she’d left the hotel in the brilliant spring sunshine, wearing a strapless lilac satin ball gown, with a wide sash bound tightly around her waist above a multitude of petticoats that caused the enormous skirt to move as lightly as a swaying bell. It was the first time she’d worn the latest present he’d given her, the entire Fabergé parure he’d assembled of imperial Russian jewels: the great web of a necklace that had belonged to a grand duchess, the splendid pendant earrings, the eight bracelets, and the hair ornaments like giant snowflakes. The jewels, inspired by eighteenth-century design, were made with infinite delicacy. Their deep garlands, elaborate swags, and extravagantly complicated bows made Tessa sparkle with every movement of her head, as if she’d been sprinkled with frost and ice, as if she were a princess who’d just taken two steps through fast-falling snow in order to enter a ballroom and dance all night.

She’d turned to him, her face bright, untroubled. “Don’t even bother to turn the television on until after nine, darling,” she’d reminded him as she kissed him good-bye. “There’s no possibility that the show will run less than four hours, and I’ll be on last.”

Did she guess, he asked himself, did she have the faintest idea of the shameful, grotesque torments of jealousy that afflicted him when he had to share her with her work? Was that why she’d spared herself his presence tonight, so that she’d be free to enjoy herself with her peers, free to bask in the roar of the crowds as she made her arrival outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion?

For the past few months they’d been in Los Angeles, abandoning the ranch they’d bought in Texas, while Tessa made her annual film, this year a romantic comedy with Dustin Hoffman. Was it possible that Tessa suspected the humiliating extent to which he was held captive in a piercing grid of jealous anxiety, from the moment she left in the morning until she returned from the studio at night? He had always exercised all his will to keep it from her, Luke told himself, and there was no reason to believe he’d been unsuccessful.

As he trod a restless path from the window to the television set and back again, he examined his behavior with Tessa for the ten thousandth time and came to the invariable conclusion that during their marriage he had managed to keep the toxic fumes of his jealousy from escaping into the air of real life. But what if Tessa was even more sensitive than he believed she was? Could she know what he was feeling, no matter how he covered it up?

Christ almighty, he wanted
all
of her, he wanted to possess her entirely, every atom of her being. Every one of her smiles should be reserved for him, she should not be allowed to look into anyone else’s eyes. The thought of Tessa spending the day surrounded by her coworkers, meeting new people, perhaps becoming interested in them, somehow involved with them on a personal level, was just this side of intolerable. Didn’t she know that her voice, merely asking a question or making a request, was as romantic as a valentine?

Old friends were almost as much of a threat, old friends with whom she remembered a life that didn’t include him. It wasn’t merely obvious temptation that his ungovernable imagination invented and then gorged upon uncontrollably. He was jealous of every laugh she had with Roddy or Fiona, of every phone call from her agent. Yes, he was even jealous of her phone time with Aaron … who knew when Aaron might find a role she couldn’t resist accepting, a role that would cause her to break her self-imposed limit on work?

Yet he believed that he’d kept his hideous jealousy from her, a jealousy that revolted him as if it had been a running sore on his body. Luke reflected that he’d at least retained enough sanity to be sure—almost to be sure—that it was unjustified. He’d managed to hide his feelings while she made the film that had won her the Oscar the previous year, a brilliantly written movie called
The Winter of Doctor Star
, in which Tessa had been cast as an intern in cardiology who falls in love with a gravely ill patient played by Robert Redford. He’d concealed the wild insanity that overtook him whenever he thought of her kissing Redford. He didn’t give a shit how many technicians would be around them, how the director would be as much a part of the kiss as Redford’s lips, how it was all in a day’s work. No, fuck it, no! A kiss was a kiss and no one could kiss Tessa without wanting her. He’d lived through Redford, he’d live through Hoffman, he told himself, although the damn man had a devilish charm, a wicked humor, a special quality of nervy, wound-up sexuality that had nothing to do with his looks.

Since winning for
Doctor Star
, Tessa had refused dozens of scripts before deciding to work with Hoffman, in spite of the fact that Aaron Zucker, that persistent bastard, simply couldn’t resist phoning her wherever they found themselves in the world and pointing out that she was in the red-hot middle of her career and that it was madness not to work more often. Her agent never managed to accept her decision to make only one film a year, Luke thought in repressed fury, as he listened to Tessa’s account of her conversation. “He said, and I quote, ‘now is the time to sink my teeth into the whole fucking industry, chew it up, and swallow it for breakfast.’ I think poor Aaron should leave metaphor alone, don’t you, darling?”

“Well,” Luke remembered saying carefully, “from his point of view he probably thinks that there should be a statute of limitations on what you promised me when we got married.”

“Oh, he’s never been able to accept the fact that I was utterly serious about my decision,” Tessa said indulgently, and Luke had been happy to let the discussion drop.

Earlier today, he and Roddy had had time to chat while Tessa dressed and had her hair arranged. The man was no fool, Luke thought, although he certainly gave himself full marks for Tessa’s career.

“Tessa was
inevitable
,” Roddy had said, “I realized it the minute I saw her. Her personality and the public’s taste were going to march hand in hand, she was the girl they were going to adore even though they didn’t know it yet, and the smartest thing she’s done has been to limit her work and choose to play such widely differing roles. See, Luke, a Tessa Kent’ type has never developed, a Tessa Kent’ role has never been created. She has no imitators, she’s one of a kind. She was born with a physical presence no one else had ever possessed in the history of the screen, but it wasn’t that alone, it was never just about beauty, but about a unique personality. She’ll last, Luke, last as long as she wants to. Our girl rejects repetition and so she eludes rejection, even after almost eleven years at the top. She’s like Katharine Hepburn, a star who has no fade-out factor.”

“ ‘Fade-out’? She’s only twenty-six, for God’s sake,” Luke had objected in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that if she lost favor with the public and returned to a totally private existence with him, he’d ask nothing more of life.

“Luke, you’re not in the business, but remember that Tessa won her first Best Actress award when she was only twenty-two. I dote on that picture … 
Ivy League
 … I still think it’s my best. Tessa playing the little grad student, and big old Clint, you tell me who ever expected him to be so convincing as a happily married professor, helpless to do anything while she slowly invaded his life, terrorizing him, seeming to be perfectly normal while she was going quietly and murderously insane? I play that picture once a month at home and
I’ve never tired of it. She was brilliant, Luke, brilliant, but you know that as well as I do. Any other actress might have been tempted to do another film in which she showed again how fascinatingly evil she can be, but not Tessa. All she thought about was flying off with you to your love nest in Èze as soon as she’d fulfilled her media commitments.”